Black unlike me
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 8: People like Us
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Vincent Plush
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Vincent Plush's biography and other articles by this writer
A windswept winter's day in February 1992. The Decatur branch of the First Union Bank. Newly arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, I am trying to open what the Americans call "a checking account". Seated opposite me is an elegant young black woman, dripping with costume jewellery. Two decades later, she could have passed for Condoleezza Rice.
She peers into her computer. I am being screened. Looking up, she shoots me a sneer.
"Honey, if you so much as go one cent over on this account," her finger waving at me now, "I'll have your ass."
The look on my face registers. She already has my ass.
"Just you remember, honey," the sneer becomes a smirk. "Here in Atlanta you is the nigger."
Over and again, in the few years I lived in pre–Olympic Atlanta, I was reminded that, indeed, I was the nigger. Of a city of about 4 million, nearly 70 per cent of its population is black. I was a member of the racial minority there, and over a few more years in race–troubled Charleston, South Carolina. I became a white nigger.
GROWING UP IN ADELAIDE, IN THE 1950s AND '60s, I didn't know a single aboriginal person. Like most white Australians of my generation, I was scarcely aware of their existence, except as shadowy figures on television, on tea towels and lurking in the city squares.
They didn't enter our lives at all, except as objects of suspicion and ridicule. My grandmother used to regale us with stories about blackfellas who trespassed on the family property on the outskirts of the Barossa. "Grandpa would shoot at 'em," she said, in incontrovertible righteousness. "And that would scare 'em away." I sometimes wondered if she really meant to include the word "at" in that sentence. Either way, it was enough to scare me, and terrorise my boyhood imagination.
There was something about the Athens of the South. It was all too lilywhite, not at all like those cities of a million stories, those cities that never slept. Adelaide had only one face – white – and it seemed to be in a perpetual slumber. Rumour had it that the Adelaide Plains had been some kind of Aboriginal burial ground. Was that why blackfellas didn't live there?
Despite furtive glances through the windows of the family car – a green Austin A40 polished up for the sacrosanct family drive, 1pm to 4.30pm every Sunday afternoon, bar emergencies – I didn't see an Aborigine until I went to university.
During my first year as a music student at the University of Adelaide, a young ethnomusicologist gave a course called "Introduction to Music of the Australian Aborigines". Dr Catherine J. Ellis was then a lowly tutor, her groundbreaking research probing the cultural heritage of urban Aborigines still to be acknowledged. Passionate and inspirational, her diminutive figure and retiring nature afforded her only token status in the Eurocentric totem pole of Adelaide's musical life.
One day, she brought in an Aborigine to play the didgeridoo for the class. Our heads swimming in Beethovenian clouds, most of us thought the whole charade ridiculous and beneath our cultural station. But a few approached Dr Cath later and asked if there was any way we could learn more about the instrument, perhaps even hook a few lessons? She smiled wanly. Later, we learned that she had paid for this man's appearance from her own pocket.
A few years later, in 1971, George Dreyfus composed his Sextet for Didjeridu and Winds. A Musica Viva commission, it was designed for the embassy circuit in South–East Asia, a smokescreen masking our neglect of indigenous culture.
The didg player George Winunguj came down from Arnhem Land to rehearse with the University of Adelaide Wind Quintet. I went to a rehearsal and found the atmosphere uncomfortable, even prickly. It was hardly assisted by the composer's awkward attempts at cultural bridge building. To this day, though, I consider the first few minutes of that work, as the wind instruments create a new overtone structure atop the didgeridoo drone, to be among the most precious in Australian music. I cannot hear it without the hairs on the back of my neck standing to attention.
BY THE END OF THAT YEAR I WAS IN SYDNEY. Now barely 21 years old, my marble spared in the Vietnam lottery, I was working at one of those "temporary" positions at the ABC that once morphed seamlessly into permanence. Intolerant of a federal bureaucracy, I soon found myself in a worse one, teaching at the Conservatorium where a new director, Rex Hobcroft, was running new brooms through the institution.
I had only been there a few days when Rex asked me to come to see him. The Con had been requested to mount a tryout of the Opera Theatre in the Sydney Opera House. Three nights in late July had been set aside. Rex, bless him, knew the symbolism of this moment and decided that the Con would present a double bill of two Australian operas, probably sensing that, in future decades, there would be precious little Australian music played there.
Rex had decided to present two operas he knew well from his days as director of the Tasmanian Conservatorium where, in the early 1960s, he ran conferences on aspects of Australian music. He would conduct the opera he had premiered there, Larry Sitsky's The Fall of the House of Usher, and Christopher Nicholls would direct Dalgerie, an opera by one of Rex's composer mates from the west, James Penberthy.
Dalgerie is based on the novel Keep Him My Country (1955) by Mary Miller, better known as Dame Mary Durack. It is set in Durack country, the Kimberley of north Western Australia. An Aboriginal station girl, Dalgerie, falls in love with the white station manager, Stan Rolt, and her tribe assembles in ritual ceremony to banish her. For the corroboree, Dame Mary said, "I've rounded up a couple of dozen blackfellas from the property for you and brought them down to Sydney."
They were dazed and confused by their first encounter with a city. Arriving in midwinter, they became ill with the flu. In the rooms of a Kings Cross backpackers' hostel, which the Con's penny–starved budget had provided, they set fire to some furniture to keep warm. I "liberated" every available radiator from the Con and showed them the magic of electric fire.
Down on Bennelong Point, there was total chaos. As crews worked around the clock, we prepared operas in a construction zone that had already been declared "black" by Aboriginal activists. To get anywhere, security guards demanded permits, but no such protocols had yet been devised. We printed our own and distributed faux official documents to the nearly 400 people working on the project.
The greatest obstacles were fabricated by the small army of white "minders" who soon attached themselves to the dancers. Parodies of Bible–thumping Christians, they accused us of every conceivable debasement of our charges.
One day our accusers simply vanished. Dame Mary had played her trump card. Somehow, she managed to draw the Aboriginal tenor Harold Blair out of retirement. Blair had been in the original production of Dalgerie at the Perth Festival in January 1959. Fourteen years later, Dame Mary asked him if he could do something to "resolve" the issue. What Blair said, none of us ever knew, but when he stepped onto the Opera House stage on July 25, 1973, there was a thunderous cheer before he sang a single note.
Even after this, I could hardly claim to have known any of these Kimberley folk. We chatted and laughed in a kind of "demi–language" somewhere between English and something else. All communication was affected by white intermediaries – Dame Mary and her family, Penberthy, whose craggy Audenesque appearance and near–legendary background as an amateur boxer had come in handy, and, of course, the interloping "minders".
"You must come visit us soon," Dame Mary cooed after the whole ordeal was over. I promised her I would, but promised myself I wouldn't. Not yet, anyway.
ONLY ONCE HAD I CONNECTED WITH THIS WORLD IN MY OWN MUSIC, and it was far from comfortable and encouraging. For the opening concert of the Seymour Group in July 1977, I decided to arrange a set of Australian folksongs for the baritone Lyndon Terracini. He could play the didgeridoo, or so he said. These days it would be more appropriate to say that he could get some noises out of the instrument.
Twenty–five years ago, Terracini could "play" the didgeridoo well enough to provide the spine of my somewhat sour setting of the folksong Jacky Jacky. I had set it as a kind of corroboree, with emphasis on percussion and drone duets between didgeridoo and baritone saxophone. A composer friend, Martin Wesley–Smith, joked that the entire piece had everything in it but audience participation. For an expanded stage version in May 1978, I added that as well. In the new version of Jacky Jacky, the ensemble led the audience in a round based on the doggerel chorus:
Cricketta bubbula
Will de Mah–hah
Billie na–jah
Jin–Jinny wah.
Australian Folksongs has been performed about a dozen times around the world, with several singers, and was recorded in 1987 (Australian Music Centre CD OZM 10003). Whenever we feel brave enough to attempt it, audiences seem to enjoy singing the round. After each performance, I would go home and go to bed, relieved and pleased with our accomplishment. It would take only a few days for the first letters to arrive in the mail. Invariably, the text went something like this:
Dear Mr Plush,
I was present at the performance of your Australian Folksongs the other evening. On the whole, I enjoyed the experience, but for one matter. In your evocation of an Aboriginal corroboree, I feel that you have overstepped the mark of good taste and ownership. You have no right to use or abuse Aboriginal culture. It is not yours to use. I hope you will not repeat your lack of discretion.
Yours sincerely ...
On one occasion, I engaged my correspondent in a debate, a foolish decision that simply inflamed her passion and deepened my discouragement. Fortunately, the piece is not performed much these days, although it is included in school syllabuses. Now an entirely new generation of demurrers, younger and fortified by spellcheck, write with observations such as:
Dear Mr Plush,
I am a 16–year–old student studying Australian music. We are presently looking at those Australian compositions that have abused Aboriginal culture. Your Australian Folksongs has been the topic of much discussion and I have been designated to write to you to ask: do you now regret your decision to compose the work in such a way, and have you ever considered withdrawing it from circulation?
Yours sincerely ...
No, I don't regret writing Australian Folksongs one little bit, and certainly not my setting of Jacky Jacky. But I would not venture into such quicksand territory again.
MY YEARS IN AMERICA PLACED ME IN A KIND OF CULTURAL LIMBO. I had had no preparation for being a white person in a predominantly black environment. In Australia and in northern United States, I was part of a powerful racial majority. In the South, the stereotypes and prejudices were reversed. I would be kept waiting at supermarket checkout counters and banks, there were always problems when I attempted to buy anything on credit, when I tried to contact City Hall, the post office, the phone company. I became Sidney Poitier, invited to dinner with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.
Very early in my time in Atlanta, I had dinner with an old friend. A PhD in composition from the University of California at Santa Barbara, Jeffrey Babcock had been executive director of the New World Symphony, that wonderful youth orchestra in Miami directed by Michael Tilson Thomas. Now he had turned up in Atlanta, director of the Cultural Olympiad.
"Well, Vince, tell me what we should have from Australia," he said, almost shouting to get over the din of the yuppie Italian restaurant in Buckhead. "What is your best orchestra? Who are your most interesting composers, choreographers, artists?" I paused to buy time. "Do you have any kind of theme, something to hang a hook on?" I asked.
"Well, actually yes," he replied. "I think we're gonna try something like this: what happens when you put a white guy in a black environment and a black person in a white environment. How does that sound?"
It took a while to register. What a perfect, stunning summation of Atlanta, the sassy, in–your–face capital of the New South, with its myriads of interracial connections. With Georgia on My Mind oozing from the restaurant ceiling, I tossed out a few ideas.
My years in the South taught me things about myself, about the prejudices ingrained by my grandmother's stories and my lilywhite Adelaide upbringing, by the stereotypes in ABC schools broadcasts and in our storybooks. I learned to tell stories better, to laugh more, to take "time out". Clocks melted in Salvador Dali's searing suns. Appointment diaries drowned in the torpor of languid afternoons on the prawn scullers that plied the backwaters of the Carolina Low Country.
In my early 40s, I was too old to become a Southerner. An Aries and of Irish descent, I was too prone to frenetic nervousness. But for those five years, it was fun to become another person, to have one long day ooze into another, to lose oneself in a clockless zone of song, liquor and fixins'. I didn't realise it at the time, but I don't think I have ever been happier.